Eurocentrism (the second edition) by THE GOAT HIMSELF Samir Amin is a stellar read. Like damn talk about a book that has just completely rewired my brain. Itâs a necessary intervention that touches on many topics from historical materialism, imperialism, White surpemacist myths about the exceptionalism of âthe Westâ, etc. But it is primarily a critique of culturalism (he defines it better in the book), and also an attempt to expose Eurocentrism as a distorting force in the social totality: history, culture, and the social sciences⌠a force in which Marxism has not escaped unscathed from. The book talks about many things, but its throughline is strong and coherent. Itâs also well organized so donât fret about getting lost in the sauce.
At the end of the book you even get an introduction to Aminâs global law of value. See Lauesen (2025) for the incorporation of the global law of value with a broader economic framework relevant to today.
Anyway. I have some excerpts from Eurocentrism I wanted to share. Iâm gonna quote a lot of stuff below just as a warning. :v
Marx combines an immanent tendency to social polarization with the fundamental logic that governs the accumulation of capital. This tendency to polarization is continually countered by the social struggles that define the context within which accumulation occurs. The dialectical relation between the tendency to polarization and reactions against this tendency has nothing in common with the method of ordinary economics, i.e., the search for the general equilibrium spontaneously and naturally produced by the market. It is poles apart.
What is observed in reality? On the one hand, the tendency towards pauperization and polarization is not obvious if the central countries of the global capitalist system (20 percent of the system's total population) are considered over the long run. This observation is the main argument against Marxism: " You see, Marx's predictions have been contradicted by history." However, if the world capitalist system is considered as a whole, then the polarization is more than obvious, it is unquestionable. A theoretical conclusion should be drawn from these twin observations: that in capitalism (as is so often the case with complex systems) the whole (the world) determines the parts (the nations) and not the reverse. The whole is not the sum of its parts but their combination. From that, it should be concluded that polarization is immanent to global capitalism and, consequendy, the less developed countries are not on the path that will lead them to catch-up with the most advanced capitalist countries.
This conclusion persuades us to continue the work Marx began, to complete and strengthen it by paying more attention to the global character of the system, bringing out its characteristics and tendencies. In order to do that, it is necessary to go beyond the "law of value" as understood within the context of the capitalist mode of production and grasped at its highest level of abstraction. We must specify its real form of existence as the "law of globalized value." That implies, in turn, an attentive analysis of the successive phases of the development of global capitalism and their particularities, after which the specific successive forms of the law of globalized value can be examined.
Such was and remains the challenge to which historical (i.e., subsequent to Marx) Marxism must respond. Has it done this? There was and still is much resistance to doing so because of the tendency towards Eurocentrism, which is strong in Western Marxism. That tendency leads to a refusal to grant imperialism all of the decisive importance that it has in really existing capitalism. The Marxism of the Second International (including Karl Kautsky) was pro-imperialist and consequendy encouraged an interpretation of Marx that is linear, evolutionist, and semi-positivist. Lenin, followed by Mao, opened the way to go further. In Lenin, this occurred with the theory of the weakest link: the (global) socialist revolution begins in the peripheries (in this case, Russia), but must be followed quickly by socialist revolutions in the centers. Since this expectation was disappointed by subsequent events, hopes were transferred to other peripheries (after Baku in 1920). This expectation was confirmed by the success of the Chinese Revolution.
But then new questions are posed: what can be done in the backward peripheries that break (or want to break) with capitalism? Build socialism in a single country?
The question and the challenge remain unresolved: the polarization immanent to really existing capitalism places revolt or revolution for the majority of the people who live in the periphery of the system (the 80 percent of humanity forgotten by bourgeois ideology and, to a large extent, by Western Marxism) on the agenda and hinders radicalization in the centers. That implies a new view of what I call the " long transition from global capitalism to global socialism." This is not the view of the Eurocentric First and Second Internationals or the view of the Third International (socialism in one country).
This part sticks out too. I like the way he mocks the âuh itâs not real capitalismâ line of thinking.
On the other hand, the idea of speaking of "actually existing capitalism" never arises. Capitalism in popular opinion, and we will see the same thing in scholarly analyses, is the North America and Western Europe of the television serial Dallas, the welfare state, and democracy. The millions of abandoned children in Brazil, famine in the Sahel, the bloody dictatorships of Africa, slavery in the mines of South Africa, and the exhaustion of young girls on the assembly lines of the electronics factories in Korea and elsewhere, all of that is not truly capitalism, but only the vestiges of the previous society. Worse yet, these are non-European forms of capitalism, and it is incumbent on the people concerned to get rid of them so that they can enjoy the same advantages as Westerners. In one form or another, it is a question of one stage in a line of development that homogenizes the world in Europe's image.
If Orientalist Eurocentrism has fabricated ex nihilo the myth of the "Orient," this myth cannot be countered with a corresponding, inverted Afro-Asianist myth, but only with specific and concrete analyses of each of the sociocultural areas in the two continents. We must also avoid the two stumbling blocks of affirming immutable "traits" (of Confucianism, Islam, and so on), which easily lead to the trap of culturalism and nationalism, and of developing fragile judgments from these characteristics. To take just one example, Confucianismâformerly considered to be the cause of China's backwardnessâhas become in recent years the explanation for its economic take-off as well as for the Japanese and Korean "miracles."
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